A mere decade ago, a detailed look at every notch in the 73-year timeline of Marvel Comics would have been hard to sell to mainstream audiences.

But in 2012, when Marvel Comics is a multibillion-dollar media empire with a highly visible, blockbuster film franchise and footprints in every last pixel of the digital world, it’s practically required reading.

That’s the idea, anyway, behind “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.” Written by former Entertainment Weekly editor and comics diehard Sean Howe, the heavily footnoted, 496-page nonfiction goliath is both exhaustive and exhausting, an impressively organized telling of the company’s rise from self-made pulp purveyor to muscular corporate octopus.

And while Howe, who has also written for New York magazine and The Economist, is no slouch when it comes to untangling Marvel’s many (and occasionally slimy) arms, he smartly focuses on the people behind each decision and frequently delivers colorful laser blasts of prose.

The prologue trots out familiar Marvel characters, such as Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk, and briskly sketches the late 1930s publishing climate in which Marvel — then called Timely Comics — was born.

Central to the narrative is the avuncular Stan Lee, co-creator of Marvel’s most famous superheroes and its public face for decades. His stereotypically American blend of upbeat hucksterism and naiveté spells “beleaguered” from the outset.

Anyone looking to go deep will be rewarded. We not only get a sharp profile of Timely founder Martin Goodman, but a decent sketch of the origins of comic books in general. From Popeye to DC Comics’ characters such as Superman and Batman, we’re shown the baby photos of what have today become pop culture’s strongmen.

Howe goes easy on the historical context, preferring a sort of brisk, newsreel tone. He introduces dozens of characters — real and fictional — in quick succession, their stories neatly intertwining. It’s a clever analog of the overlapping mythologies in Marvel’s own narrative universe, which Howe asserts to be the most elaborate in human history.

The account of Marvel’s early ’60s heyday, when Lee and nascent legend Jack Kirby whipped up the bulk of Marvel’s biggest names, feels sunny and full of promise; its boom-and-bust cycles and parade of broken personalities read tragically.

However, the numbingly huge cast of characters gets unwieldy at times, and the soap-operatic elements feel repetitive, particularly as Marvel suffers a string of failed editors and expansion plans. The legal wrangling over character creation continues to this day.

Things pick up again as Howe demonstrates that Marvel wasn’t just reflecting society in its comic books, but the company’s internal struggles. By constantly shedding light on the “cesspool of politics and personality issues,” as one staffer called it, Howe invites those with a casual interest to look closer.

“It was like cocaine culture without the drug use,” one editor says, describing the company’s cheesy, ego-driven ’80s climate. There are other striking moments, as when Marvel editor Jim Shooter is burned in effigy (via a cheap suit stuffed with Marvel’s own comic books) and editorial tensions spill into office fisticuffs.

Howe isn’t afraid of melodrama, either, as when he describes the bitter telephone exchanges between Marvel executives as “epic, hypnotic fugues.”

What else would we expect from a book that trades in superheroes on a galactic scale?

Through it all, figurehead Lee sells Marvel as a chummy bullpen of buddies while remaining at arm’s length from the real business of the company. It’s a familiar story: inspiration and luck, boom and bust, creative voices fighting for air in the corporate vortex.

Encouragingly, the book takes an ambivalent tone about the value of such complex, consistently-revised fictional universes — ones that are repackaged and sold as new material on a regular basis.

Howe has obvious affection for some of the visionary names here, but his pace remains steady throughout, neither getting too sycophantic nor soft-pedaling the nauseating injustices Marvel’s writers and artists suffer over the years.

It’s daunting to take on such a project, given the complexity of Marvel’s real and fictional worlds. But as microcosms of our own, Marvel couldn’t be more relatable.

John Wenzel is a member of the Now Team, having covered comedy, music, film, books and video games for The Denver Post for more than a decade. As a proud Dayton, Ohio native, his love of Guided by Voices is about equal to his other obsessions, including Peter Jackson's Middle-earth, "Mr. Show" quotes and Onitsuka Tigers.

More in Entertainment

Thanks to the donations of thousands of dollars and free tickets, Denver-area kids are emerging from theaters energized by the blockbuster movie "The Black Panther" and insisting they also learned things they can apply in the classroom and life.